Remembering an icon of our times

ALMOST 30 YEARS AGO, I WROTE A SHORT critical study of Muriel Spark's novels, for a series entitled New Assessments, published in Edinburgh by the Ramsay Head Press.

In the beginning it was easy. Muriel's novels seemed, when one was young, simply delightfully funny, as brilliantly comic as the pre-war novels of Evelyn Waugh, himself one of the first to call attention to her genius. They were the kind of books one pressed on one's friends and delighted to quote and read aloud. The dark side and the religious seriousness should have been apparent - "remember you must die" is the recurrent message, delivered by telephone to the elderly cast, that runs through her first masterpiece, Memento Mori, still to my mind one of her half-dozen best. But we delighted in these early books on account of their wit, high spirits, odd characters, and the all-too-convincing portrayal of London life, especially in the bedsitter wastelands of Kensington and Earl's Court.

Everyone knows that the success of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie changed her life. She became, for the time being at least, rich, having lived in poverty for years. She also became a star. Success of this sort makes some novelists go soft. It hardened her. The novels, usually very short, which she wrote in the later 1960s and early 1970s, were still funny, but they were also dark, sinister, macabre. One of her own favourites among all her books was The Driver's Seat, the story of a victim in search of her murderer, who, in his "unnerving statement" to the police will say, "She spoke to me in many languages, but she was telling me to kill her all the time. She told me precisely what to do. I was hoping to start a new life." Is it any wonder that Muriel Spark puzzled critics and readers, even while they took pleasure in her work? How to reconcile the comedy with her awareness of the dark? She herself often said that a chief influence on her writing was to be found in the Border Ballads. This is nowhere more evident than in The Driver's Seat.

I came to know her after my little book was published. I never knew her well, and suspect that few did, nobody perhaps except for her friend, the sculptor Penelope Jardine, with whom she lived in Tuscany. She was friendly, easy in conversation, yet there was always a reticence, a very Edinburgh reserve.

Though she never lived in Edinburgh as an adult, the city mattered to her. It had formed her habit of thought and feeling. She wrote and spoke of its influence. "My whole education, in and out of school, seemed to pivot around the word 'nevertheless'. My teachers used it a great deal. All grades of society constructed sentences bridged by 'nevertheless' ... I can see the lips of tough elderly women in musquash coats taking tea at McVittie's, enunciating this word of final justification ... I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea ... It was on the nevertheless principle that I became a Catholic."

Her novels are comic; nevertheless, they are concerned with eternal realities; they are sparkling as Champagne and yet occupied with the first and last things. The Only Problem, for instance, is a comedy of errors and misdirection; yet she described it as a meditation on the Book of Job, with which, indeed, the central character is obsessed. And what is the problem, which is Job's? How to reconcile belief in a just and loving God with the evidence all around us of cruelty, miserly, wickedness and human folly.

The novels are inhabited, informed, by the comic spirit and the play of wit. Her wit is that defined by Dr Johnson as "a sort of discordia concors, a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike."

In Muriel Spark's novels the characters dance on a tightrope above an abyss. "Do you think," one character asks in Memento Mori, "that other people exist?" Repeatedly, absolute certainties are stripped away and normality turned inside-out. The psychiatrist is shown to understand less than his patient. Murders are arranged, the media briefed and stories sold, before they are committed. The future seems clear; meanwhile the past is being re-written. In Loitering With Intent the heroine is required to revise the tentative memoirs of the members of the Autobiographical Association to make their lives more interesting than they apparently were.

Because the novels were so light and frothy and so immediately funny, it was always easy to lose sight of the fact that Muriel Spark was also a moralist. Actions have consequences, and you must live with them. There is a hard streak of granite, a grim sense, perhaps Jewish, perhaps Calvinist, that you become what you have made of yourself, that character forms your destiny.

Of course her novels weren't true to life. They were better than that. There are authors who cause you to say, when reading their books, "yes, this is good, life is just like that". And there are others who provoke the opposite response. You find life, apparently, echoing their art. Muriel Spark comes in this category. She makes you see life in a new way, so that, every now and then you are surprised by this resemblance to one of her books, or something in them. Instead of art imitating one of her books, or something in them, it seems that life is trying hard to imitate her novels. You hear her voice in the conversation of strangers; and this is a rare achievement. AM